What the Tech? Will Coronavirus Lead to More Teleconferencing?
Will the coronavirus change the way Americans work?
As companies started sending employees home with the instructions to work remotely one company is seeing a surge of new
business: Zoom.
Zoom is a video company that allows for people to connect online for live streaming face-to-face meetings for up to 100 people. Similar to Skype, Zoom gets high marks from regular users for its stability and quality.
To see how it works, I joined a meeting with three people who work remotely and use Zoom on their computers and mobile devices to meet with clients and co-workers.
Jason Elkins is a social media strategist and business coach at 100cups.coffee. “One of the gals I’m working with is in Belgium, so overseas, it’s been streamlined. It seems to work better than Skype,” he said of Zoom.
Bayard Saunders is a digital marketer who works at Haven Innovation and often does his work at a shared office space.
Mailynne Calvin is also a social media strategist who works with a team of other employees who all work remotely. She rarely goes into the office but uses Zoom every day. “We use it as a team for all of our internal meetings and then we use it externally with all of our clients,” she said.
Calvin sent out a meeting invite through email. To join the meeting, I just clicked on the link which took me to the Zoom website and platform. I chose to join the meeting over my desktop computer.
You can also join meetings using the Zoom app for iPhones or Android devices. It was very simple and took only a few clicks that asked me to give it permission to use my web camera and microphone.
During the meeting, all of the attendees are pictured at the top of the screen but when someone begins to speak, their picture pops out into full screen. Attendees can share files and documents and even video of their computer screen. Meetings can be recorded and shared.
“Zoom also has filters so there’s a nice sheen over any blemishes that you have,” laughed Elkins. That’s true. I noticed the picture quality is much better than using the same camera with Skype. Each person in our meeting was on camera with no harsh lights or glares.
Audio quality was also very good though it will determine on your internet connection.
With previous meetings using Skype I found the picture almost always froze a few times in a 15 minute meeting. No such glitches with all of the one-on-one and business meetings with Zoom.
Elkins has used Skype and Google Hangouts, but prefers Zoom for its stability and ease of use, even for clients who’ve never logged into a web conference before. “This just seems to work,” he said. “Platform independent, experience independent of what people have done in the past. I think that’s one of the big advantages of Zoom. It just works and it’s easy.”
There is a 40 minute meeting limit in Zoom’s free service but the company lifted that limit in China in the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak when many Chinese companies sent employees home to contain the illness.
Stateside companies are doing the same, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and others hoping to contain the virus is asking workers to do their work from home or at least without coming into the office.
As this becomes more commonplace in the virus aftermath, will those companies warm up to the idea of more employees working from home and conferencing in using Zoom or another video conferencing software? Saunders thinks so.
“The technology will get better,” he said. “If the technology gets out of the way, the more it does that and the more this seems more human for us, that’s really the direction we need to go.”
Calvin, who has no complaints about the Zoom service, agrees. “We’ve been on this platform for 2 years but we’ve worked as a team remotely for four. And for us, we’re performance based so it doesn’t matter if someone physically sees me do something or not.
If I’m not getting my work done, everyone else on the team knows and same for everyone else,” she said. “I think it’s more
of a mindset shift for everyone. I hate that it took the Coronavirus to push people this way.
There’s a lot of cool things that happen when you work as a remote team.”
